With nearly 1000 pages, this heavy book was baked for you by two of best videogames researchers. I gathers many articles that anyone serious about the study of games must (or at least should) have read. The articles gathers are quite different, ranging from scientific essays about the definition of videogames (Huinzingua, Caillois, Suits, etc.) to players gaming diaries and professional game developers postmortems (Valve Software on how they created Half-Life, Lucasart on their pioneering MMO &q
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Keywords : research, game studies, history, definition
This learning project intents to raise students awareness on videogame academic research through Project Based Learning (P.B.L.). The students are involved in our different research project through the design of serious game, talks about history or culture related research or even through the creation of original gameplay principles... The students are also invited to share their own points of view through collective debates and group projects relying on their personnal thoughts
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Keywords : game design, education
A serious game created the 100th anniversary celebration of the "Gargas caves", a prehistoric site located in France. Famous for its negative wall-paintings of hands and its overlapping engravings of animal figures, part of this cave is unfortunately no longer visitable. Indeed, public access limited to avoid the deterioration (due to lightning and or CO2 rejected by breathing visitors) of its historical treasures. This virtual version of the caves presents you with a wall roc
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Keywords : serious game, prehistory
This book gives a portrayal of several famous video game creators: Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal Tournament, Gears of War), Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda...), Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims...), John Romero and John Carmack, alongside with three bonus chapters dedicated to the first video games, to military Serious Games (America's Army) and to MMORPG players (Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies). Overall, the book is very pleasant to read and filled with interesting information. The portraits of c
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Keywords : history, cliff bleszinski, will wright, america's army, star wars galaxies, anarchy online
Bill Kunkel, usually known as "The Game Doctor", is one of the videogaming press pioneers in the USA. With his lifetime friend Arnie Katz, he started to write down articles about videogames in 1978, for the Video magazine. In 1981, the two pioneers launched Electronic Games, the first magazine dedicated to videogames published in the USA - if not in the world. This autobiographic book gathers numerous trivia and short stories coming from the career of Bill Kunkel: the birth of Electron
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Keywords : biography, bill kunkel, video games, press, usa, electronic games, the game doctor
A tiny book (140 pages in small format) gathering trivia and funny stories about 50 famous videogames: Pac-Man, Mario, Zelda, GTA... Each game is presented over two pages by several pictures and a short text. While this book reads easily, most of its information is far from being unique. Most of them are now part of the common knowledge of the average videogame player, or can be easily found in Wikipedia and similar sources. Anyway, this book remains a good gift idea for anyone discovering video
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Keywords : history, anecdote, simple
This book is full of nostalgia, as it details games, machines and other elements of the videogame culture (ads, magazines, etc.) coming from a "golden era" of their history, according to the author: from the end of the 70's to the beginning of the 90's. This book gathers about 200 games and memories from the author, who are described with passion over one or two pages each. As the author is British, he was exposed to the European wave of videogames. This book will thus triggers a lot o
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Keywords : history, games, machines, europe, culture
The autobiography of Ralph Baer, the inventor of home video game consoles. Released in 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey is one of the starting points of the history of video games. First of all, it's the first video console solely dedicated to games. Moreover, one of its titles, Ping-Pong, was a direct source of inspiration for Atari to create Pong. Through a book featuring many pictures, Ralph Baer details us the process he followed to invent this first console ever. As a natural-born engineer, he ke
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Keywords : ralph baer, magnavox odyssey, first video game, simon, lawsuit, biography
A small book (150 pages) laying down a general introduction to the universe of videogames. The author details the history of videogames (with the contribution of the Le Diberder brothers and their "cycles theory" on this topic), the various jobs of the videogames industry and the process of game design, and in a last chapter try to analyze the future of videogames as a communicational tool. An English translation of this book was published in 2006 under the title "Video Games And
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Keywords : introduction, jobs, history, schools
The french written reference about the history of videogames. This must-have book has know five different editions between 1997 and 2012. It details the story of many famous videogames thanks to interviews with their designers: Pong, Tomb Raider, Tetris, Doom, Myst, Sim City, etc. The book also have a background story with the life of Philippe Ulrich, famous french game designer and founder of Cryo, who have lived through all the stages of the videogames history. A very interesting read with a l
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Keywords : french, history, phillipe ulrich